Early Years Is Politics: What South Africa Can Teach Us About Children’s Rights

There was something rather serendipitous about how I came to read Children, Our Future, Barbara and Terry Bell’s account of the struggle for early childhood care and education in South Africa. I was given the book at the funeral of my husband’s oldest friend. I began it, put it down, and was prompted to finish it after meeting South African colleagues at a conference in Finland where we were discussing how we sustain the planet for our children. Sometimes books arrive at the right moment.

This is a history of Early Childhood Development in South Africa, but it is also much more than that. It is a story about poverty, race, politics, women, community action and the persistent failure of governments to recognise that if we want to change society, we have to start with its youngest citizens.

The book establishes that argument early with Comenius, writing in 1633, that if the world is to be renewed, renewal must begin at its roots. Nearly four centuries later, Nelson Mandela made essentially the same moral case when he argued that there could be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats its children. And there is the rub. We have known this for a very long time.

Children’s rights are political

The South African story makes particularly stark the relationship between Early Years education and social justice. Apartheid did not simply shape where people lived or worked. Its racial and social engineering shaped which children received care, education, nutrition and opportunity.

Even after Mandela declared children one of the highest priorities of the new South Africa, the 1995 education White Paper gave surprisingly little attention to the Early Years. The result was provision that remained fragmented, contradictory and inadequately planned.

That tension between the rhetoric of children’s rights and what children actually experience runs throughout the book. The history of corporal punishment provides one example, but the bigger question is one we still face: what does it mean to say children have rights if those rights are not experienced in their everyday lives?

For those of us working in Early Years, this matters. Children experience fairness or unfairness long before they have the vocabulary to describe either.

Poverty: whose problem is it?

Another powerful strand is poverty. The historical debates recorded in the book sound disconcertingly modern. Is poverty created by systems and structural inequality, or by irresponsible individuals? Should hungry children be fed, or should their parents somehow be punished for allowing them to become hungry? The language changes. The argument stubbornly survives.

The book looks back to the work of Charles Booth and Rachel and Margaret McMillan and the battles over hungry, unhealthy children living in the slums of London. Reading this while Britain is once again debating free meals and support for children living in poverty is a useful reminder that very few of our supposedly new arguments are actually new.

The Bells also widen the definition of what children need. Fresh air, good food, exercise and loving care sound beautifully simple until you consider a child living without clean water or sanitation, breathing polluted air from coal-fired power stations and industry. The environment, health, poverty and education cannot conveniently be put into separate policy boxes. Children live them simultaneously. Something we are looking at in London through the campaign on air pollution.

The women who simply got on with it

For me, the book really comes alive through the people. There is an obvious affection for Margaret and Rachel McMillan, and I share it. Margaret lived among poor communities rather than simply visiting them to dispense good advice. She saw malnutrition, rickets and appalling poverty and decided something had to be done about it, setting up the Rachel McMillan Nursery School and Training Centre.  The book references how she managed to raise philanthropical funds giving up on governments as none seemed to care. She and Rachel were formidable, purpose-driven women who endured criticism for spending too much time on the education and welfare of children and apparently not enough on politics. Of course, the irony is that Early Years is politics.

The same pattern emerges repeatedly in South Africa. Women see children and families who need something better, organise themselves, establish nurseries, find teachers, feed children, persuade people, write letters, raise money and keep going. One wonderful example was Jane Evans who established the farmworker nursery movement. Women with little previous experience established provision and then used what they learned to support development elsewhere. They were tenacious and purpose driven, using their passion and fury for children’s rights to become community catalysts, building their confidence and making decisions for themselves. There is something reassuring about discovering that Early Years campaigners have apparently always written endless letters. We are part of a long tradition. Keep writing them.

Ideas travel, but they need to belong somewhere

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the movement of Early Years ideas across countries. South African teachers came to London, learned from developments around Deptford and the McMillans, and returned home to translate what they had learned into provision appropriate for their own communities. That place based distinction matters as I know from my own work on replication  of the social enterprise model through the London Institute of Early Years.

There is a beautiful international thread running through this history: pioneers learning from one another, adapting ideas and passing them on. From the McMillans to Montessori, from London to South Africa, and through later community and non-profit organisations, Early Years has always been an international conversation.

Education or catastrophe?

The book continues through South Africa’s political violence and the brutality of apartheid, yet the preschool movement keeps growing, sometimes slowly and erratically, driven by campaigners who refuse to give up. H. G. Wells famously described human history as becoming a race between education and catastrophe. It is difficult to read this book without wondering how much faster we have actually become.

War, poverty, racism, inequality, environmental degradation and violence continue to shape childhoods across the world. Yet so too do teachers, parents, campaigners, social enterprises, charities, foundations and communities determined to create something better. And perhaps that is why this book ultimately feels hopeful rather than depressing.

Again and again, people decide that what children have inherited is not good enough. They organise. They challenge. They create nurseries. They train teachers. They feed children. They build community organisations. They influence policy. And, eventually, some of those ideas become part of the architecture of a more democratic society. The campaign running through the book is remarkably consistent: universal, free and egalitarian early childhood education and care.

The final chapters bring the story into contemporary South Africa, where policy commitments to overcome the inequities created by apartheid still have to survive the “crucible of practice”. That may be the most important lesson in the book.

Writing a policy is relatively easy. Creating a right is harder. Ensuring every child actually experiences that right is harder still. Children, Our Future reminds us that the struggle for Early Years education has never simply been about childcare. It is about what sort of society we intend to become and who gets to belong in it.

The pioneers in this book understood that. So did Mandela. So did the McMillans. The rather awkward question for the rest of us is: if we have known all this for so long, what exactly are we waiting for?